Stories We Could Tell (38 page)

‘His large hands were too powerful to resist,’
Misty giggled.
‘His mouth fastened on her rosebud lips like a vice.’
She looked up at Terry. ‘Now how can lips possibly be like a vice, you silly cow?’ She shrugged. ‘Oh well…
She felt his desire rise up inside her –
that’s a bit of a Freudian slip, his desire rising up inside her –
then suddenly he swept her up in his rope-like muscles and carried her to the waiting four-poster. “Damn you, Valerie!” he cried hoarsely. “Why should we wait another year?” And she knew in her beating heart that her reticence was only inflaming him still further.’

The real reason Terry felt a little blue today was because for the first time he could see an end to the whole music thing. He thought it was changing. But it was more than that. It was dying.

One of his best friends had been kicked out, and the other one seemed suddenly to have a proper job, his future set in stone, the career of an adult. They had sent Ray off to New York to talk to Springsteen. His comeback was complete.

But for Terry this life was coming to its natural end – as if it was really just his version of going to university, or doing national service. A few years and you were out. You went in a boy and you came out a man. All grown up. Or at least on your way to being grown up.

You turned around and the bands were new, and a bit younger than you, and you didn’t like them quite as much as the bands you kicked around with at the start, the bands who were now struggling to record their second albums, or trying to crack America, or arguing among themselves, or overdoing the drugs. Suddenly, just to seem interested, you had to fake it a bit.

And the faces in the clubs and at the gigs were changing too. Now every night he went out he was aware that he no longer knew everyone in the house. The familiar faces were thinning out.

The day after the Western World disaster, Billy Blitzen had gone back to New York, deported by the Home Office for not having the correct work permit. Legend had it that Billy went home to Brooklyn with his guitar full of Iranian heroin, which he sold at a rock-bottom price to his kid brother, who had never even smoked a spliff before. Terry had no way of knowing it as he sat on that train with Misty, but Billy was just a few years away from a date with a disease that none of them had heard of yet.

And whatever happened to all the other boys and girls that Terry had known back in the summer of 1976? Where had they all gone? To drugs and nervous breakdowns? To marriage and babies? To real jobs and early nights? He would never know.

He knew he would miss the good stuff. He would miss coming down the stairs of some club into a world of noise, his spirits lifting with the music and the speed, the feeling of sweat inside his Oxfam jacket, and the overwhelming sensation of being a part of it all. But he couldn’t kid himself. The life he had known was drawing to an end.

He tried to remember what Skip had said. He knew it was something about all art forms having their day. Like jazz had its day. Like painting had its day. Skip had said that there would probably never be another Miles Davis, and there would never be another Picasso. Skip had said that the music would never again be quite as good as the music they had loved, and so you were left with
just another dying art form, and soon it would be ready for the museum.

But if their music was dying, wouldn’t they die with it? It had been the heart of their world for as long as Terry could remember. Their music was more than a soundtrack – it was a life-support machine from childhood through adolescence and into what was passing for maturity. Perhaps they were all going to have to find other things to live for, and the music would be just something they came back to now and again, like the memory of someone you had lost.

As he waited for the train to leave the station, Terry felt lucky that he had a woman he loved, a baby on the way, and a little family of his own. Things would be easier after the wedding, wouldn’t they?

‘She felt the love she had for him burning inside her. He was all she wanted and all she would ever need. Her young body trembled with a thrill that felt one step from sin. Soon she would be his wife and be his forever.’

Terry walked down to the dining car to look for tea and bacon sandwiches. By the time he came back empty-handed, Misty had put down her book and was staring thoughtfully out of the window.

‘They’re on strike,’ Terry said. This bloody country. Somebody should do something.’

But she wasn’t listening. She didn’t care about bacon sandwiches and strikes on British Rail.

‘What do you think is better?’ she said. To never change – to be the same person you always were as a kid – or to grow out of all that stuff and grow old gracefully?’

‘We’ll never be old,’ Terry smiled. They’ll have invented a cure for it by the time we get there.’

She stuffed Doris Hardman into her bag, and then paused when she caught a glimpse of something. She pulled out her pair of pink fake mink handcuffs.

‘Remember these?’ she said, as if they would bring the fond memories flooding back. But all Terry remembered were silly games where he didn’t know the rules.

He watched her snap one of the pink fake mink cuffs around her wrist and admire it, as if it were the finest bracelet in the window of Ratner’s. Then, with one of those aren’t-I-a-naughty-thing? looks on her face, she reached across the table separating them and snapped the other cuff around Terry’s wrist.

‘I remember,’ Terry said.

Misty rippled with laughter. ‘I wonder if Doris Hardman would approve?’ she said. ‘Can you believe that millions of ordinary women fill their heads with that garbage?’

Terry nodded. ‘Can you take it off?’

Misty fumbled in her bag for the key. Then she began to search more desperately, and it took a long moment for him to realise that she wasn’t joking. Terry stared at the pink fake mink handcuffs around his wrist and then he looked away. He loved her but sometimes she drove him crazy. Was that real love? Or was that something else? Did true love really have room in it for irritation? Or was that kind of love a lesser kind, a love that was already on the way out?

The thing was, now that he knew he was definitely going to be with this one girl – woman – for the rest of his life, he sort of missed all the others he had known. And he couldn’t help wondering how it would have turned out if he had gone with one of them instead.

He missed Sally, missed her goodness and decency, and he missed the way she didn’t look like everyone he had grown up with. He missed that lustrous black hair, he missed those eyes like melting chocolate, and he missed her slim, golden body inside the sleeping bag on the night shift. He missed how straightforward she was, and he missed her friendship. He missed the way she never mentioned the suffocating tyranny of men.

And he even missed Grace Fury, despite the strangeness and the horror of her visit to his flat, because everybody wanted her, and because he loved it when they had that wildness inside them.

Terry could have been happy with any of them. At least for a while. They were all great women in their way, and they all liked him. Maybe more than Misty liked him. Because he knew he irritated her too. Loving someone – it wasn’t the same as liking them.

And he wondered how much choice we really have in the person we end up with, and how much of it is down to pure chance. That was the big problem with loving someone. There were lots of other people that you could love, if the timing was right, and if you got the chance, and if you were not already promised to someone else. It all just seemed so random.

But Terry had built his dreams around the one in front of him, and there was a baby growing inside her, he had to follow those dreams through now. Then she winked at him, and smiled, and he was aware of the old feelings, felt them rising up inside him, as strong as they ever were. Maybe it would be all right after all. Maybe it would. He looked up as a whistle blew, knowing that, either way, it was too late to stop now. The whistle blew again.

The train lurched forward and began to move out of the station, the jewel lights of the city soon yielding to the soft dusk of harvest fields, and they headed north into what was left of summer with the pair of them still joined at the wrist, just like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway prisoners in
The Defiant Ones
, or the bride and groom on a wedding cake.